看一下这个。楼下SAT2400贴后面的一个跟帖。我就有一个问题

她睡觉吗？还是bullet points 之外那些成就水分比较多？

Let’s play a game.

Imagine you’re an admissions officer, and your job is to admit students. Your job is notnecessarily to admit the most outstanding students. Your job is to construct a freshman class whose members will be interesting, mature and enthusiastic in their contributions to the school.

Applicant A’s resume reads as follows:

• She has a 4.0 (unweighted) GPA.
• She received a 2400 on the SAT on her first try, and 800s in all of her SAT Subject Tests.
• She did 13 AP-level subjects, including some which were self-taught.
• She’s done well in a range of academic competitions (e.g. maths competitions).
• She plays the violin well and the piano competently.
• She’s the concertmaster of the school orchestra and plays a non-trivial role in several school committees.
• She played badminton for the school team.

Do you want to admit her?

Sure, she’s clearly capable and hard-working—in other words, she’s smart enough to keep up with the coursework, like 80% of the others—but that’s about all her resume tells you. There are loads of applicants, thousands, who are just like her. She might have done all this just to get admitted; in other words, she could potentially be success-driven and not all that interested in contributing to the school.

But wait: she’s also the co-founder of a startup, she came second at Startup Weekend in her area, and she gets paid to develop websites for another startup. Hm! She’s a writer, a digital artist and a graphic designer, and her violin playing is good enough that she could become a professional if she so chose (for those who don’t play music, professional-track violinists devote 3+ hours a day to practicing, even in high school—and so it probably indicates that she genuinely likes the violin). She’s into all sorts of weird subjects like classics, geography, art history and earth sciences. She volunteers with local efforts to help teach people programming. She represented her state in Future Problem Solving. She was the design leader for her region’s Mathematics Olympiad Student Association, which runs math competitions for schoolkids and tries to remove the stigma around math. She was the lead organizer of a student-run, government-funded game development hackathon for high schoolers, the first one in her area.

Now do you want to admit her?

Now she’s more individual. There are surely still candidates who are way more impressive, but you can see who she is. You can probably deduce, from the slightly unconventional nature of her resume, that she’s genuinely interested in all this and probably isn’t doing it just to get admitted.

Applicant A is me. Years ago I could just have submitted the first half of that resume and gotten admitted. These days I’m not sure I’ll be admitted even with both halves, but I realized pretty early on that the track I was on at the time—the track to being conventionallyoutstanding—wasn’t really enough.

How did I realize that? I played this game. I pretended to be an admissions officer.

NB: I’m not a US citizen—I’m an international applicant from New Zealand, and an IB student—so I made some Americanizations in that list.